Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Unsexed

The universe, readers, is conspiring to keep me from having sex. Despite the fact that b&c is in Jordan, consulting by day and being a human pincushion by night, my own opportunities for play have severely dried up since last Thursday. Familial obligations (Darn those unpredictable kids. When your daughter calls you and tells you that she can't work because she burned her hand on a microwaved lunch at the office, there's not much you can do but go and pick her up and be nice to her, but trying to explain to the craigslist guys you just arranged play dates with that you're no longer available for that reason is almost certain to lead to people not believing you.) have limited and will continue to limit (a family trip to PA for Father's Day) my opportunities. And then, of course, there was last weekend's trip to Rehoboth.

Other people may have a lot of sex at the beach, but I don't see how anyone has sex in Rehoboth. Everyone seems to spend so much time posturing and drinking that there can't be any time or sobriety left for actual sex. Though I suppose there are some people who can still get it up when they're falling down drunk, and there are always double-headed dildos. Which reminds me to do some research sometime to see if there are dildos with more than two heads. For those group relationships consisting entirely of bottoms or social gatherings when a bunch of bottoms get together to drink Cosmos, dish, and ride the Hydra. Well, what else would you call it? (I do not mean, by the way, to imply that bottoms are more likely than anyone else to drink Cosmos, or dish. But it's hard not to conclude that they'd be more likely than, say, tops to ride the Hydra, assuming it were to exist.)

All of this reminds me of a gay(er) version of Sex and the City, which I saw in Rehoboth on Friday night. I thought the movie was fun and that the producers did an adequate job of providing me with eye candy. I did not expect more than fun and eye candy from the movie, so I was not disappointed by the lack of any great depth. There are, after all, plenty of movies that have no great depth yet still fail to provide me with either fun or eye candy.

Rehoboth seems a bit subdued this year, and the chatter is that the economy generally and high gas prices in particular are to blame. I did spend $65 to fill my tank on the way there, but it's hard to imagine that people are passing up on weekends that run to several hundred dollars (at least) because of an extra twenty or so bucks at the pump. In any case, I do not mind seeing fewer people at Rehoboth. I understand that a relative lack of visitors is bad for the local economy, but it also ameliorates the twin evils of traffic and having to wait for a table at a restaurant.

I had planned to further reduce traffic concerns by traveling down Thursday evening, but I got a call from Jeff asking if I could take Duncan (Jeff's boyfriend) with me, and it turned out to be easier to do that if I picked him up in Annapolis, on the way, on Friday morning. Friday morning is still a low-traffic time, so I met Duncan at the Nordstrom in Annapolis, where he was having some shirts put aside so that he could a) buy them next (now this) week when they're on sale, and b) get Jeff's approval for the specific shirts he'd chosen. When we got out to the parking lot, I took the opportunity to change the rear blinker bulb which had blown Wednesday. The process involved a wrench, four bolts, a new blinker bulb, some bottled water, and a Band-Aid. Then we were off. Unlike all of Jeff's previous boyfriends, Duncan is someone who is actually pleasant to spend time with, and the traffic was very light, so the drive was fine. He also showed me an alternate route. Woohoo.

I was fortunate this year that my annual summer visit happened on a slow guest weekend for Jeff. Typically, there will be a group of his friends there, and they'll want to hit the bars on Friday and/or Saturday night, and I'll be forced to suffer through two hours of men trying on different yet indistinguishable outfits in the hope that they'll make themselves marginally more attractive to unknown men who they will never have the guts to talk to. They will, nonetheless, tell me that both the preparation and the actual bar going are much more fulfilling than an Internet sex date. This position is generally very much misguided, but as Jeff prohibits either the bringing home of men from bars or the inviting over of Internet conquests, it's only half as misguided as usual. I'm not, by the way, complaining about Jeff's policy. I go to the beach knowing that no one's going to hook up, so I'm not disappointed. I just don't get how the other guys know the same thing and should know that even if the policy were rescinded they still wouldn't be hooking nonetheless manage to be disappointed.

Anyway, there was only one other guest (Jay, a decidedly cute Korean from Wilmington) and no bars this weekend. We had an excellent dinner on Friday (pistachio crusted swordfish with wasabi mayonnaise, mmmmmm) followed by the movie, and on Saturday evening, when the lack of both bar hopping and sexual frustration had so demoralized Jay that he had left early, we had another excellent (albeit early and very, very hot because we could only get an outdoor table at 6:15) at The Cultured Pearl, where I had a squid and seaweed salad that I shall remember fondly for the rest of my days. Then the three of us went back to Jeff's townhouse, where our plans to play board games were destroyed when Jeff flipped on the TV and Silence of the Lambs was starting. It is the one movie that I (and, apparently, others) cannot resist watching, whenever it's on.

We also took several walks, including a brief, 4.5-mile stroll to and along the beach on Saturday morning, and on Saturday afternoon, Jay dragged Duane out shopping, where they spent roughly four hours for Jay to buy two shirts and for Duncan to pick out but not buy one shirt that he hoped Jeff would later approve. I spent the same time doing a bit of grocery shopping, taking an extended nap, and failing once again to break a million in Word Dojo. Truly, my idea of a good time at the beach.

There was some talk of my going back sometime in July, when b&c will be whoring working in Colombia and Nicaragua, but I don't think it's likely. I'm not sure whether I dread more the prospect of fitting in with or not fitting in with the conspicuous consumption crowd, but as much as I like the beach (which, I grant, you would never know from the way I write about it), I dislike the scene more, and the truth is that at Rehoboth, the beach isn't all that, and the scene is all that and a ton of bricks. My idea of a beach holiday is a place far from crowds and outlets and bars (ok, maybe one bar, but a beachy version of a dive bar), where you bathe in the morning and take a long walk at sunset and cuddle under the stars at night and have cold, rum-based drinks late in the afternoon after having spent the balance of the day reading a lazy book in the shade and napping in between bouts of surprisingly energetic sex.